- gutvol-d - lists.pglaf.org

google releases some cool data
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 08 Aug '06

08 Aug '06

google is releasing some very cool data into the wild, based on a corpus of a trillion words from web-pages. one trillion. if you know anything about previous projects in this vein, you'll know that a corpus this big is totally unprecedented. as google points out -- > http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/08/all-our-n-gram-are-belong-to-you… -- this data is quite useful across a wide spectrum of arenas, including "statistical machine translation, speech recognition, spelling correction, entity detection, information extraction..." you'll note that we've discussed some of these topics before... -bowerbird p.s. this entry to google's official blog was posted by two people from the "google machine translation team", for whatever that might mean... i've suspected their research labs are _way_ out front on these things, and the near future will see a _lot_ of advances coming from them...

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more on google machine translation
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 08 Aug '06

08 Aug '06

more on google machine translation here, from april 28th: > http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/04/statistical-machine-translation-… -bowerbird

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Registry of US Government Publication Digitzation Projects
by Tony Baechler 07 Aug '06

07 Aug '06

Hi all, This might be of interest to some of you. As you probably know, all US government publications are already in the public domain so no clearance is necessary. The site isn't clear as to how the various items will be made available, I.E. page images, text, etc but one could assume that all content could be added to PG. Also, people from this list might want to make suggestions for what should be digitized first. The below is from the rss feed of http://www.researchbuzz.org/ . Did you know there was a Registry of US Government Publication Digtization Projects? Me neither. But there is, and you can both contribute your institutions projects and browse through the existing ones at http://www.gpoaccess.gov/legacy/registry/. There's not a lot here, unfortunately, though I like what I do see. You can do a [...] URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/researchbuzz/main/~3/9307953/

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re: [gutvol-d] Wired on HOPE: Hart/Newby presentation
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 06 Aug '06

06 Aug '06

well, first of all, congratulations, greg, on co-organizing what sounds like a neat conference, on interesting topics, with an admirable attendance of 2,000! > email webmaster(a)promo.net to make your views heard. > He has not listened so far... the person in charge > there is Pietro diMicelli, who was our Webmaster > from about 1995 - 2002. if he hasn't "listened so far", what makes you think more e-mails will convince him to such this action? i'm speculating the parting had some acrimony in it, and his unwillingness to make you happy is a result. why not just make sure that reporters like this one give the link that you want them to in the first place? -bowerbird

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re: [gutvol-d] Categorizing PG content
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 06 Aug '06

06 Aug '06

karen said: > Suggestion: have a competition to design > an open-source cataloging system for e-books, > where there are no physical constraints on "shelving." > Publicize it in library schools. Major ego-boo for the > teacher/graduate student whose scheme is accepted, > free design for PG. um, i don't know that i'm seeing much quality thinking coming out of the library schools, i am chagrined to say. besides, it's not so much the "design" that is so difficult, but rather the _implementation_, and the grunt work of assigning e-texts within the system. so it'd be far better to have the competition at the _programming_ level... and again, much of the design work has already been done, when this thread had an earlier incantation on this listserve. if no one is willing to check the archives, what's the point?... finally, i'm not sure that y'all understand the major need here. and i'm quite certain that library-school students will miss it. answer this question: why should we categorize the e-texts? i'm serious. formulate an answer. i'll wait... got one? ok, great... if your response runs along the lines of "so end-users can find the book they want, and download it", you're on the wrong path. that's the function catalogs used to serve, in the dead-tree world. after all, since a person had made a trip to a library to get a book, and would have to be making another trip to bring it back, it made a lot of sense for that person to find a book that they would enjoy. in that scenario, the catalog helped avoid the cost of a wrong choice. the physical nature of bound pages creates a situation of obligation. but in our new era of high-bandwidth and terrabyte hard-drives, it's silly for a person to spend even mere seconds trying to decide _whether_or_not_ to download a book. it's _far_ more convenient to download vast portions of the library, since they can have their computer do it automatically while they are partying, or sleeping... even the dial-up people can request the d.v.d., for free, and have the entire p.g. library sitting on their hard-disk in a week or so... not only is it not wise to make people spend any time "choosing", it's at odds with the important concept of _unlimited_distribution_. and that's why the library-school people don't understand this. because unlike them, we _want_ people to take a whole bunch! it's not just that there's "no shortage of shelf-space" with e-books, it's that we have an endless source of production. so take 'em all! we are all still trapped, to a large degree, by our history of scarcity, so it's difficult for us to realize how deeply it pervades our thinking. (especially since we all live in the real world too, where scarcity still is a hard fact of life.) but this is one place where we can shed that... these implications of unlimited-production-and-distribution turn our thinking on its head. instead of helping users choose what to _pick_ in the library, we have to help 'em choose what to _discard_. in many ways, this is a much easier task. human genome project files? ya, you probably won't want 'em. e-texts in a language that you cannot read? you can skip those. text-to-speech files? videos? magazines? maybe yes, maybe no. they start with 20,000 "possibles", weeding 'em out to their taste, thanks to our handy-dandy program, which then auto-downloads the ones that are left, in the background, with zero input needed. at that point, the cost of selecting a book is double-clicking it and starting to read it. and if it doesn't appeal to you, just stop reading and go on to the next one. you don't have much need for a catalog. oh sure, it might still be kind of handy to have be guided to e-texts, so some means of categorizing an e-text as being "similar to" others would be nice. but that's how we need to _approach_ this project, from the get-go, and not from our implicit notions about "a catalog", because those are outdated and irrelevant to the task now at hand. you're barking up the wrong tree if you don't rearrange that thinking. but anyway, as i said, a system of categorization would be handy, and i'll have some work to show in that regard in a separate post. i believe it's important to start out with the philosophical point... -bowerbird

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Wired on HOPE: Hart/Newby presentation
by Greg Newby 06 Aug '06

06 Aug '06

Michael and I presented at the HOPE conference a couple of weeks ago. (Michael was the keynote speaker, I was the lackey.) There's a nice article about the conference, including an actual picture of Michael and I together (one of very few that exists!). http://wired.com/news/technology/0,71450-0.html -- Greg

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The Terrible Twins, by Edgar Jepson - missing pages
by Al Haines (shaw) 06 Aug '06

06 Aug '06

My copy of the above book was published and copyrighted by The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1913. I discovered while scanning it that it was missing two leaves - the ones for pages 3 and 4, and pages 53 and 54. Can someone who may have this book provide me with images of the missing pages? Thanks, Al

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re: [gutvol-d] Different Typefaces
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 05 Aug '06

05 Aug '06

andrew said: > Yes, Project Gutenberg volunteers have dealt with a wide > variety of material outside of just plain prose, including it would be nice if that experience was captured and communicated in a "best practices" type of document covering various situations... the massive inconsistencies in the e-texts came about largely because no one had guidance like that, and just had to go off on their own... i could be wrong about this -- i'd love to be wrong about this -- but i don't remember much in the f.a.q. that covered questions like this... -bowerbird

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re: [gutvol-d] Different Typefaces
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 04 Aug '06

04 Aug '06

onorio said: > The editors have, at certain points, put the > actual text of the notes in a different typeface. > Any thoughts on how one can > indicate this in a plain ASCII format? if you think of the different typeface as a "bracketing" mechanism, solutions will present themselves, such as surrounding notes in _actual_ brackets (straight or curly). you can also prepend the notes with a label, like the word "note: " (notice the semi-colon). some ascii-based viewer-apps -- like mine -- will then treat that paragraph in a special way (e.g., by colorizing it), since that's how _plays_ get formatted correctly. if the notes are short enough, you can even mark them as italic, or bold. or indentation, as andrew suggested, works. similarly, you can wrap those paragraphs to a much shorter line-length. basically, anything that makes the notes _distinctive_ will work... -bowerbird

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Different Typefaces
by Onorio Catenacci 04 Aug '06

04 Aug '06

Hi all, The book I'm working on scanning in is a posthumous collection of the works of a scientist. The editors have, at certain points, put the actual text of the notes in a different typeface. Any thoughts on how one can indicate this in a plain ASCII format? -- Onorio Catenacci We're all just doves, Trying to find our way home.

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